Avuncular American

Financial-Judicial-Governmental Crisis: Belgium's Vacuum

Last summer I wrote of "Belgium's Lost Year," marking twelve months of political confusion after inconclusive national elections in June 2007.  Now that the very tenuous government formed by Yves Leterme has submitted its resignation (its fourth), the country will apparently spend Christmas and New Year's consumed with the never-ending political drama.  Or perhaps not.  Crisis or not, there are feasts to be consumed and parties to be thrown.  And politics really is the last thing that Belgium needs more of.

The proximate cause of Leterme's fall is government interference in the judicial process over the resolution of the Fortis Bank crisis, violating the separation of power.  But Leterme's fall could also be seen as the first governmental casualty in the worldwide financial crisis.  It is his government's eagerness to get its way in the bailout of Fortis that led to tinkering with the judicial process.

Belgium's Leterme and his coalition government may be the first direct political casualties of the financial crisis, but indirectly, we know that John McCain paid the price for being in the same party as George W. Bush.  The financial crisis, metastasizing into an economic crisis, may claim other governments before it is over.

At the very time that the private sector is increasingly dependent on bailouts from governments, public coffers are denied tax income from a constricting private sector.  Where is the bailout money going to come from when governments like those in Belgium and the U.S. run out of money?  The printing press?  China?  But then who gets to bail out China when its industry feels the pinch from shrunken Western demand?

Belgium usually muddles through, and the King will have his work cut out for him to deal with this latest resignation.  He refused to accept Leterme's previous ones, though, as wags have noted, the PM's political lives are dwindling.  Even cats have only nine lives.

With this, I wish all my readers a Merry Christmas, a happy Hanukkah, and survival in 2009.  It will be a good New Year, because it won't be 2008 any longer.  I'll be in places with intermittent internet connections over the next ten days or so, so please stand by for full Avuncular production in 2009.

Shoes? Throw the book at Bush & Cheney

Full disclosure: I enjoyed watching, and replaying, the shoe incident in Iraq as much as anyone.  Muntazer al-Zaidi might be suffering a few broken bones, but he's probably lucky that the Iraqi security people got to him before a Secret Service bullet.  And thanks to Emine Saner in yesterday's Guardian, we have a cultural guide to insult symbolism throughout the world.

But here's the thing: if getting a pair of shoes thrown at him is the worst that George W. Bush experiences, then he's getting off very lightly.  If anything, al-Zaidi's gesture of frustration is symbolic of the feelings of millions, not just in the Arab world, who will see Bush take leave of Washington on January 20 and say to themselves:  That's all?  He just walks away?

Bush and his VP Cheney deserve more than ineffective (but entertaining) gestures.  They deserve a hearing - in court.  Blogger/lawyers Scott Horton of Harper's and Glenn Greenwald of Salon.com have done yeoman work over the years documenting the Bush Administration's transgressions of US law and the Constitution, especially in the matter of torture.  They focus on the truly important, while the rest of us get distracted by shoes, Blagojevich, and Madoff.

The latter are, despite their apparently brazen corruption, ultimately transitory characters.  Bush and Cheney, however, have bequeathed America a stain that will be long lasting.   So they deserve - not just shoes - but the book.

Giving Information Ministers a Bad Rep

Cholera is a calculated, racist attack on Zimbabwe by the unrepentant former colonial power, which has enlisted support from its American and Western allies so that they can invade the country.

Sikhanyiso Ndlovu, Zimbabwe Information Minister (CNN, 15 December 2008)

There are no American troops in Baghdad! The infidels are committing suicide by the hundreds on the gates of Baghdad.  We slaughtered them.

Mohammad Saeed al-Sahhaf, aka "Baghdad Bob," Iraq Information Minister (USA Today, April 2003)

It's unfair to all those earnest information ministers out there in the world to quote two of the most notorious deniers-of-reality of this century.  Just Google ministry of information and see what you come up with.  Links to information ministries in all manner of countries with little or no press, free or otherwise, but a helpful ministry to provide whatever meets their approved version of reality.

During the two World Wars, Britain had a Ministry of Information, which, according to the UK National Archives, was "the central government department responsible for publicity and propaganda."

The United States has no such "central government department," though some would argue that it needs one.  Public Diplomacy, the responsibility of the State Department, vies with "Strategic Communication," which increasingly has a military accent.  In such quality blogs as "Mountain Runner," observers like Matt Armstrong engage readers to ponder what institutional and legislative arrangements best suit the U.S.  Ex-USIA officers Patricia Kushlis and Patricia Lee Sharpe in Whirled View show how much of the experience acquired under the defunct United States Information Agency has been lost after its forced absorption into the State Department almost a decade ago.

This post is not really intended to give proper treatment to a very weighty subject (Matt is doing that in a big way next month in a conference in Washington).  But last week's outburst from the Zimbabwe Information Minister blaming cholera on everyone but his own president's misrule underlined again that it's not the messenger, nor the medium, but the underlying reality that counts.

America's progress in "the war of ideas" will depend - as has its failure in the last eight years - on the content of its policies.  Garbage in, garbage out.  Practice what you preach.  What goes around, comes around.  Reap what you sow.

It matters much less whether the Minister of Information or the White House Spokesman provides the (dis)information.  Credibility, once lost, takes ages to restore. Among the many things that must be done starting January 20, restoring America's reputation will take everything that a President Obama can give it.

Gotta Change: The American Way to High Office

Short of the Blagojevich Reform Revolution (in addition to wanting an ambassadorship or some other plum post, he actually promised to “change fundamentally the way campaign dollars are raised in the state of Illinois”), it would really just help to recognize that the function of Personnel is a largely professional, as opposed to political, function.

Two articles this week point us in the right direction, and both touch on the staffing of the State Department.  I don't mean the Foreign Service, which has a highly competitive, non-partisan process for entry.

No, it's the spoils system of political appointments, which, as Pat Kushlis reminds us in Whirled View, has resulted in "burrowers" left behind by the Bush Administration in the future Hillary Clinton State Department:

Does she realize how shrunken the State Department has become and will she be willing to spend the capital to turn the situation around? Does she understand how demoralized its professional staff is?

How does she plan to handle that new category of employees created by the Bush administration called Schedule B – created to place W loyalists in positions they can hold onto for life – unless the individual position itself is abolished in its entirety? Talk about W’s Trojan Horses and the expansion of the political spoils system, once again, at the expense of professionalism.

We're not talking about the usual Ambassadorial political appointees, who must submit their resignations as a matter of course whenever there is a change of President.  No, these burrowers are, as Pat says, "Trojan Horses" who try their best to blend into the woodwork and pretend they are career civil servants.

And for a look at how the Bush White House Office of Presidential Personnel dealt with sensitive appointments to foreign affairs positions, here's Thomas Sweich in yesterday's New York Times:

[The] interviewer was part of a large corps of 20-somethings — some were in their early 30s — who ran the Office of Presidential Personnel. Many of them were sons or daughters of supporters of President George W. Bush. Others had connections through congressmen. With few exceptions, they had one thing in common: very little experience and a very big attitude.

Another top foreign service officer called me after his interview to be ambassador to a volatile African country. “The problem was,” he told me, “the kid interviewing me could not pronounce the name of the country I was being interviewed for. It made for an awkward interview until he just started saying ‘the country we are considering you for.’”

We've seen this before: it was the Green Zone Way, the CPA career path, from RNC to Baghdad.  Those 20-somethings who had the right attitude on abortion, and no experience in the Middle East.

The Obama Transition team has so much on its plate, and there are those 300,000 applicants for a couple of thousand jobs.  But as it sifts through the CVs, I suggest they heed Sweich's cautionary tale, and bring a bit of adult supervision back to government.

Trouble in the Homes of Human Rights

By homes, I mean France and the United States.

Don't get me wrong: both countries respect human rights to a great degree (though not unreservedly: see Gitmo, torture, Abu Ghraib).  Certainly more than many places on this earth.

France even has a junior minister in charge of human rights, though to listen to her boss the Foreign Minister, the Sarkozy administration apparently has doubts as to the utility of the post.  Talk about lousy timing: his remarks guaranteed conflicting headlines on the very day that the UN is marking the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

In Washington, the State Department handed out awards in the service of human rights to some of its own: the US Ambassador to Zimbabwe and the Political Section chief in Sri Lanka.  Both very deserving, they were joined by a Russian human rights campaigner/journalist at the ceremony.

France was right to create a sub-cabinet level post to call attention to human rights abuses, and the junior minister has been outspoken.  And the United States State Department is right to persist in its efforts to document abuse by other countries, even while the current US administration sullies the reputation of the country that used to lead the way in the field.

Here's hoping that the 61st anniversary this time next year will allow unequivocal adherence to the quest for human rights in the two countries which owe their founding to that very cause.

Reg. Peking Dept. Agr.

BEIJING - CHINA, which has weathered a series of scandals over food safety, has put 12 US food products on a 90-day import alert after they were found to contain a banned dye or excessive additives or preservatives.

The import alert comes as the US maintains a ban on imports of food from China, unless they can show they are free of dairy or free of melamine.

The compound, used in making plastic, was added to Chinese baby formula, killing at least six Chinese infants and making hundreds of thousands sick.

Earlier in the week, China's General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine (AQSIQ) impounded and destroyed Italian brandy, Spanish dairy products, Belgian chocolate and seasoning from Britain. -- REUTERS

Oh Lord.  It's the bit about Belgian chocolate that got me going.  Actually, I don't like the idea of destroying "Italian brandy" either - would that be grappa?  Seriously, this is one of China's sillier efforts in its tit-for-tat approach to international trade.  Anyone who knows Belgian chocolate (thanks to Chocolate.com for the above display) knows that it's among the world's purest - and tastiest.

In the United States, even before the Federal Food and Drug Administration was thought of, there was the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture:

Over the years, many consumers across the U.S. have come to recognize the small print on many food product labels "Reg. Penna. Dept. Agr." (Registered Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture). Historically, Pennsylvania has been known to have some of the more exacting food manufacturing regulations in the U.S. If food manufacturers registered their products in Pennsylvania, this was indication they met requirements in other states.

That was before China's exacting standards became the norm.  Who knows, we may all have to add melamine to food to receive the "Reg. Peking Dept. Agr." seal of approval.  Maybe the Irish got their chemical substances confused when they added dioxin, and not melamine, to their animal feed.

As long as the Belgians don't cravenly cave to the Chinese, their chocolate should be just fine.

Fewer Coups, But Men-With-Guns Thrive

"Why coups are less and less popular," a fascinating chart on The Economist website, is worth a look.  It's a snazzier version of the report put out by the very serious HIIK, the Heidelberg Institute for International Conflict Research, as part of the Human Security Report Project (HSRP).

It shows how "le coup d'etat" is way down as a means of toppling governments.  From its heyday in 1963, when there were 25 coups, through 2007, when there was just one.

Of course you never know: there used to be a joke in US embassies about how a CIA station in West Africa would submit an annual coup prediction, knowing that they'd eventually get it right.

I only experienced one coup, whose initial stage was largely bloodless: the Algerian Army's overthrow of one of its own, President Chadli Bendjedid in 1992, and its subsequent cancellation of elections that the Islamist FIS party was poised to win.  We had a view from the living room of the tanks below our window, streaming down the waterfront boulevard in Oran.

Though the coup itself was relatively bloodless, the aftermath has been more than a decade and a half of bloodletting: Algeria descended into a spiral of terrorist violence and reprisal from which it has yet to fully emerge.

I'm sure that the people who developed the coup chart are meticulous in their methodology, and have footnotes to annotate instances of regime-change, where, like in Iraq in 2003, the coup was administered from the outside.

And then there's the category of regime-change in a stateless territory, like the overthrow of the Somali Islamic Courts by US surrogate Ethiopia, which Aidan Hartley ("The Zanzibar Chest") describes so well in the current Vanity Fair.  That's a "coup" for you: the only group which is capable of reining in on the anarchic warlords and pirates is overthrown.

Sometimes militaries don't need to carry out a coup to exert their power, as Steven Cook illustrates in his book "Ruling But Not Governing."  In which he shows how the militaries in Egypt, Algeria, and Turkey, in ways both overt and subtle, exercise the real power behind the scene.

Coups beget coups.  My diplomatic career began in 1979, in the same month that the Shah of Iran was overthrown in the Islamic Revolution.  His career had begun in a coup, helped to power in 1953 by the CIA.  Some of my diplomatic classmates wound up as hostages in the 1979 US Embassy takeover.

I went off to the "quiet" Caribbean, and just missed witnessing the pro-Cuban coup on the island of Grenada in March 1979.  During my time in the Eastern Caribbean, I dealt with some of the aftermath of Maurice Bishop's coup.  He in turn was killed in a 1983 coup, which precipitated (presaged is another word) Ronald Reagan's "rescue" of the island from the Cuban menace.  Live by coup, die by coup.

This is beginning to resemble something from Forrest Gump, interloping on history.  Sorry.

So I will end with today's "Analysis" from BBC World Service, which you can listen to here.   It's full of examples - like Condoleezza Rice meeting first with Army chief General Kayani during her recent visit, before she even sees the elected civilian leaders - of why in Pakistan, it's still the Army that calls the shots.

Coups: they may be falling out of favor, but their absence is not proof of democracy's rise.  In much of the world, men-with-guns, whether of the respectable kind that have traded their uniforms for business suits, or those who command child soldiers, are still very much with us.

Muslim Eid in Europe Tested by Extremists

The extremists in this case being a particular brand of European racist who uses a peaceful Muslim holy feast to desecrate - again - the tombs of hundreds of Algerian, Moroccan, and Tunisian soldiers at one of France's largest World War I cemeteries last night.  The tombs of Jewish soldiers were also defaced with swastikas.  The photo at left was taken after graffiti was removed from a previous desecration earlier this year.

Today is the feast of Eid al-Adha or Aid al-Kabir, which coincides with the end of the pilgrimage to Mecca.  The world over, Muslim families are gathering for a feast of lamb, and perhaps a visit to a cemetery.  Whoever desecrated the soldiers' graves knew the significance of their act.

The first time we experienced the Eid was in Tunis, in a middle class neighborhood where each back garden was sure to have orange or lemon trees.  In the days leading up to the Eid, the bleating of lambs was added to the occasional barking of dogs or street cats battling it out over garbage left on the sidewalk.

Until the Eid, when the bleating stopped.

All over Europe, authorities have taken steps to accommodate their Muslim citizens' need to slaughter sheep.  Here in Brussels, where at least 17% of the population is Muslim, this has included setting up several additional temporary slaughterhouses.  In some neighborhood schools, principals can expect up to 90% of their pupils to miss class, since the Eid doesn't have the status of a school holiday like certain Christian feast days.

The Economist recently featured an article that chronicles the impact of large Muslim populations in many of Europe's major cities:

In some of these places bad relations between Muslims, non-Muslims and the authorities are creating political opportunities for the far right.  Yet talk of civilisational war in Europe’s cobblestoned streets is out of line in one respect: it understates the ability of democratic politics, especially local politics, to adapt to new social phenomena. For cities to work, compromises have to be struck and coalitions assembled.

Here in Brussels and in other cities with large immigrant populations, first and second generation Muslims have run for and been elected to office.  Even where the local politicians are not Muslim, they are attuned to the needs of their voters.  We should expect this, and take it as a natural part of the process of immigration and assimilation that has always taken place.  I wouldn't object to hearing the occasional call to prayer - it would bring back memories of Alexandria or Algiers.  Or maybe the ecumenical mix of Melilla in northern Morocco, where the Spanish enclave featured muezzins and church bells.

Speaking of church bells reminds me that it's not just the Eid this December 8.  It's also the Catholic feast of the Immaculate Conception.   Happy feast day, and Eid mubarak.  And a plague on the house of all extremists who can't live with a little bit of religious diversity in their midst.

African Reputations: Ghana & Zimbabwe

There was never a better time to prove the point - Governor Palin, are you paying attention? - that Africa is a continent and not a country.  The news coming from two widely separated corners shows the contrast:

Ghana: the country's fifth democratic, contested presidential elections are taking place today, and the country is debating how best to manage an oil bonanza due to start in the next two years

Zimbabwe: starvation has exacerbated the cholera epidemic, which is added to the endemic hyper-inflation and political violence.  Now even some African leaders are calling for armed international intervention to save the country from Robert Mugabe's calamitous rule.

If you are looking for the latest information on Ghana's elections, check this wonderful page from the BBC World Service, which provides audio and text background and results starting 1830 GMT on Sunday.  For local flavor and minute-by-minute updates, read "Think Ghana" and its Decision '08 blog, by three enterprising young Ghanaians.

Personally, I want Ghana's winning streak to continue, for it is a very impressive country.  Airports tell you something about a country, and Accra's international airport is clean and calm - extremely reassuring in a region where air travel is sporadically deadly.  Ghana - even before the discovery of oil - was fast on its way to becoming a regional center; French is increasingly overheard, thanks to francophone businessmen seeking a safe place to do business near sometimes war torn Ivory Coast.

But it was not always so.  I returned from a series of trips to Ghana a couple of years ago, and was enthusing about the country's progress with a friend who had served in the Peace Corps in the French-speaking Sahel in the Eighties.  She was surprised at the change from her time in the region, as Ghana's reputation then was one of military coups, corruption, instability, and firing squads.  Today, an interested visitor might see the seaside firing ranges that the very professional Ghanaian Army now only uses for target practice.  In 1979, that's where they carried out the execution of the losers in a military coup.

This oscillation in the reputation of African countries is nowhere more evident than in Zimbabwe, which was known as the "jewel of Africa" in better days.  Before its 231 million percent annual inflation rate and $200 million Zimbabwe Dollar note (AFP photo at left from yesterday is already outdated).  For an idea of the extent of the paradise that was lost, read "How To Kill a Country" in the December 2003 Atlantic by (current Obama State Department Transition Team adviser) Samantha Power:

The country's economy in 1997 was the fastest growing in all of Africa; now it is the fastest shrinking. A onetime net exporter of maize, cotton, beef, tobacco, roses, and sugarcane now exports only its educated professionals, who are fleeing by the tens of thousands. Although Zimbabwe has some of the richest farmland in Africa, children with distended bellies have begun arriving at school looking like miniature pregnant women. How could the breadbasket of Africa have deteriorated so quickly into the continent's basket case? The answer is Robert Mugabe... who by his actions has compiled something of a "how-to" manual for national destruction.

Dr. Power likely thought that five years ago Zimbabwe had reached its nadir; today it's impossible to say just how much lower the country can go.  And unless Mugabe himself contracts the rampant cholera, it's hard to imagine what - short of his army turning on him - can put an end to the misery.

"Nation branding," or the cultivation of a country's reputation, requires more than a marketing effort for African countries.  No PR campaign on CNN International or BBC World can erase the total failure of governance and the evident misery of Zimbabwe's population.  But Ghana, which returned from the precipice of failed statehood, offers hope to a post-Mugabe Zimbabwe.  The question is: what will be left to govern?

Mandarins & Vassals: China Deals With the West

This week:

• French President (and current EU Council President) Nicolas Sarkozy meets with the Dalai Lama today in Poland
• Because of the above meeting, the Monday 1 December EU-China Summit was postponed (by the Chinese)
• Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson attended his last US-China Strategic Economic Dialogue

The latter cannot have been easy for Paulson, who used to lecture the Chinese thusly: "healthy capital markets are absolutely critical to any nation's long-term economic success" (on the eve of his September 2006 inaugural meeting).

(Chinese character "west" from About.com)

Now, of course, China's continued investments in the very unhealthy US capital markets are key to US economic survival.  How far things have come.  But Paulson learned this week that the Chinese appetite for its piece of the US pie is not insatiable.  This, from the Wall Street Journal:

The head of China's sovereign wealth fund says he's lost the confidence to invest in U.S. banks, while China's central bank governor Zhou Xiaochuan didn't even stay in town. Instead, he flew to an international meeting chaired by Mr. Paulson's intended successor, Timothy Geithner.

Paulson shouldn't feel so bad: it's the same attitude that has people tuning out when his boss steps to the podium to "announce" that the US economy is in recession.  Thanks for telling us, now that it's up to your replacement to deal with it.

Back to the Chinese.  This was their week to show who is calling the shots.  Jean-Vincent Brisset, director of research at the Paris think tank IRIS (Institut de relations internationales et stratégiques) shared with Le Monde his thoughts on why China consistently overreacts to French initiatives (my translation)

The Dalai Lama issue is just a pretext.  China is punishing France, but in reality what it doesn't like is European unity. You hit the weakest link... just like in my Army company, when they used to say "you always pick on the same one, so that only one person complains."

China has had a bone to pick with France since 1989, Brisset explains, when France convinced the EU to impose an arms embargo after the Tiananmen Square massacre.  Brisset concludes that China sees French attempts at reconciliation as a sign of weakness, the way a "vassal" state would act under the old Chinese empire.

Whether France is a Chinese vassal state may be debatable, but there is no question that China has its acolytes in the West, including a number in Washington.  The always reliable Ken Silverstein, writing in the August Harper's Magazine ("The Mandarins: American foreign policy, brought to you by China"), catalogues the bipartisan China "expert" lobby's ways of hiding its business connections to the PRC.

Stonebridge [International, an advisory firm] might best be seen as a sort of one-stop shop for international fixers - a collection of former government officials who replicate, in privatized and miniaturized form, the official foreign-policy apparatus. Both the clients and the former officials benefit immensely from the exchange: for the latter, Stonebridge serves as a holding pen in which to draw a prodigious salary while awaiting a return to the State Department, say, or the Commerce Department, or the National Security Council. Stonebridge's cofounder is Sandy Berger, who before joining the Clinton Administration (in which he became the top national-security adviser) coordinated business lobbying for China at the law firm of Hogan & Hartson. He was perhaps the foremost architect of the administration's dramatic shift in China policy; which moved in short order from solidarity with the spirit of Tiananmen Square to the promotion of trade above all else.

Silverstein shows how China's "visa blacklist" shuts out the rare critical academic or consultant: the price of access to China is acquiescence to its mixed record on everything from human rights to environmental standards.  In the revolving door between government service and the private sector, individuals knowledgeable on China know which red lines not to cross.

A close friend with years of experience negotiating with Chinese once told me that an old trick was to get the visiting foreigner drunk, the better to embarrass themselves in front of their Chinese hosts.  It tends to put them at a disadvantage in the next day's bargaining.

(Chinese character "foreigner," About.com)

Right now the West - be it Henry Paulson looking for more Chinese investment, or Nicolas Sarkozy finally acceding to meeting with the Dalai Lama, well after the Beijing Olympics - is that drunken, stumbling foreigner, searching for the proper posture of submission before the potentates of Peking (sorry, but I am tempted by alliteration). 

Helena Cobban, in Just World News, captures the historic nature of the turnaround in her post "Paulson fails to melt Chinese hearts: "This is a huge, truly world-defining story."  But why is the West in this perilous position?  Here, you just need to remember what Charles Dickens' Mr. Micawber said in David Copperfield:

"Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery."

Until and unless the US (especially) and the rest of the West get off their China habit of cheap goods and bountiful (but with a price) sovereign capital funding, we will be at their mercy when we come hat in hand.  And as Paulson just saw this week, they might just start acting like Mr. Scrooge.